New Love

“Blue Is the Warmest Color.”

Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos in a film directed by Abdellatif Kechiche.Credit Illustration by Istvan Banyai

Rumors, rumbles, and other palpitations have beset “Blue Is the Warmest Color” since it showed at the Cannes Film Festival, in May. The jury, chaired by Steven Spielberg, awarded the Palme d’Or to the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, and his two leading ladies. Clearly, this was a work to be reckoned with, but what did it contain? Sex, allegedly, and lots of it: untrammelled, unabashed, and practically unprecedented. We heard that the film was a love story about Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a high-school student, and Emma (Léa Seydoux), who is a few years older, and that the dramatizing of that love would make us claw our popcorn into tiny particles. We even heard that the performers had complained of their treatment at the hands of Kechiche. In short, this movie has become a myth, gilded by an NC-17 certificate and crowned by news from Idaho, where depictions of explicit sex may not be combined with an alcohol license, and where patrons of Flicks, an art-house cinema in Boise, will therefore be forbidden to see the film. Heavens! If it’s all too much for Idaho, how will the rest of us cope?

Well, here’s an idea: sit down and watch. And here’s what you will see: a three-hour character study, set in the northern French city of Lille, and spread over several years. The French title is “La Vie d’Adèle—Chapitres 1 et 2,” which is plainer and more accurate, yet more affecting, since it implies that, if life is a novel, there are more chapters in store. I hope so, not because I expect a sequel but because the end of the film makes you long for Adèle to be happy, though you fear that such a day may never dawn. And it is her tale; the affair with Emma lies at the core, but, well before they meet, we see Adèle sleeping with a boy and avidly kissing a girl, and a sad percentage of the movie is spent by Adèle on her own. Having left school, she herself becomes a teacher, of kindergarten and then of first grade, and here’s something else you may not have heard about the film: more time is devoted to the classroom than to the bedroom. The kitchen and the dinner table, too, receive their due. Of course, we know what turns Adèle on, but, as with any fulfilling portrait of a body and soul, we also learn what happens when desire is turned off and other skills and longings come alive: when she carefully spoons a dab of chicken into a triangle of pastry before deep-frying it and serving it at a party; or when, with instinctive tact and patience, she teaches little children how to read. Blue may be the warmest color, but cooler hues can tell an equal truth.

In short, there are—as Spielberg, of all people, will have noticed—more traces of Truffaut here than there are of “Last Tango in Paris.” Over the years, as the shock of Bertolucci’s film has dimmed, so its savage loneliness has deepened, and that is the point, I think, from which Kechiche departs. His earlier work—especially “The Secret of the Grain” (2007), about a laid-off shipyard worker who opens a couscous restaurant—was packed and populous, rife with family squabbles, tested friendships, and tempting feasts. Now he is damming the flow, as it were, and asking the question: what if love gets in the way? How does the wish to be utterly alone with the loved one, and the dread of being alone when the loved one leaves, fit into that wider, more sociable vision? It takes two to tango, but many more to make a dance of life. Hence the unforgettable image of Adèle in the sunshine, at a school gala, leading her pupils in a kind of shuffling conga. Dressed in bright ethnic costume, they are all smiles. But her smile is barely skin-deep; in the previous scene, we saw her in a blazing brawl with Emma—a conflagration that left Adèle stumbling along a nighttime street in feral moans of distress. Right now, a single closeup shows that, though encircled by young spirits, she wants to die.

So much of this film is absorbed in closeups that, in regard to Adèle, it all but lays down a law: watch her lips. We see her asleep and breathing steadily, like a gentle wave, before falling in love; asleep but whimpering when deprived of passion; and awake but softly gasping as she lies back in the sea, on a trip to the beach, with her face to the sky. The film is, to a compelling degree, the history of that face—tearful, sniffing, puffed with dismay, spotted and blotchy on a cold day, suddenly ravishing, and reddening in embarrassment or lust. Now I understand what it means to be in the full flush of youth. When she is still a student, there’s an amazing explosion as a gang of her female friends starts to taunt her for being gay, having glimpsed Emma hanging around outside. The screen is crammed with faces, shouting and contorted, and you realize that, despite all the campaigns for sexual tolerance, in France and elsewhere, nothing will ever tame the hyena-like teen-age habit of snapping at the frailties of others. The shyest member of the pack is always the first to go. Hence the shots of Adèle walking away, no longer listening to the yelps of her contemporaries but making for a newfound land.

And so to bed. A strong feminist case could and will be made against “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” alleging that its most naked aspect is Kechiche’s unblinking gaze. To be blunt, is he not getting off on these women, and arranging them to his own satisfaction? Maybe so, but, in reply, his fans will point to the force and the firepower of the lovers’ intent: a fusillade of cries and clutches, grabs and slaps—a pitch of pleasure so entwined with desperation that we find ourselves not in the realm of the pornographic but on the brink of romantic agony. How can it last? Emma is more worldly and less woundable, but Adèle, like any new recruit to a revolution, believes that it can and must endure. Thus, when the camera rises over the pair of them, locked and prostrated by the eager geometry of soixante-neuf, and floating on a bedsheet of oceanic blue, it is, if anything, a relief to see them as pure bodies, blissed out at full length, and no longer just as heads trapped in closeup and besieged with worries, words, and all the other short-term fripperies that keep us from the epic of love.

If there is anything tacky in this movie, it is not in the main course but in the quality of the appetizers. Like any serious foodie, Kechiche cannot resist a bonne bouche. I am prepared to believe that Adèle doesn’t like shellfish, but does Emma have to convert her by giving a master class in the swallowing of oysters? Wasn’t that already a stale trope by 1963, when Albert Finney and Joyce Redman slithered through their gastronomic duel in “Tom Jones”? Why couldn’t Emma stick to shrimp? Then, there’s the lengthy smooch that she and Adèle enjoy in the open air, on a bench, framed so that the sun twinkles like a star between their mouths; and their trip to a museum, where we focus exclusively on marble derrières and painted nudes, all female, as though no other art could ever matter. Perhaps it doesn’t, to a heart possessed.

These are minor faults, and they serve a purpose, reminding us just how depleted the vocabulary of erotic distraction—verbal and visual—has become, and proving, despite a few stumbles, how determined Kechiche was to make it new. That, I guess, is why he went to such extremes. It also explains the vein of comedy that courses through the film, much of it at the expense of French intellectual tics. Emma, with her gap-toothed grin and her mop of blue-dyed, self-cropped hair, is a painter, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. (“Are there arts that are ugly?” Adèle asks, which may be the wisest question in the movie.) Emma, who, to judge by the stuff on the walls, is a far lesser painter than Adèle is a teacher, seeks nonetheless to interest her young lover in a world of higher culture and the folks who inhabit it. Adèle, however, is unmoved. “My muse, my inspiration,” Emma calls her, but who wants to be an excuse for art? There’s a fabulous, half-second shot of Adèle glancing aside, at a party, where people are droning on about the distinction between Schiele and Klimt; and, on the same evening, you can tell what she thinks of the Byronic braggart who offers his reflections on orgasm, and on why women “attain different levels of reality.” Philosophers can talk about reality all night; she lives there, with a wildness of which they can only dream.

And that is the story of this film—the most consuming and most exhausting of its kind since “The Dreamlife of Angels,” fifteen years ago. From the moment when Adèle first catches sight of Emma, on a busy crosswalk, the movie restores your faith in the power of the coup de foudre and yet redoubles your fear of its effect; love, like lightning, can both illuminate and scorch. The problems of two little people, it turns out, do indeed amount to a hill of beans. Some hill. Some beans. ♦